Anyone tried ROS on Rpi2/3 + Navio2

Navio / Edge Flight stack
1

I think I’m at a point now that APM just isn’t going to fit the bill of things I need to do. I’m starting to look at other setups like ROS and was wondering if anyone has experience with them on Navio2.

I see a lot of older posts on the Navio+ and mixed reports and horrid things like apt-get upgrade nuking coprocessor access etc.

2

Why you need ROS?

3

Its not so much that I need ROS as I need something other than APM.

  1. I’m working with automated rover, I don’t need any of the drone code
  2. PRs take forever to get merged, need quick iteration of features
  3. Need tight integration with with other subsystems
  4. APM has limits, take waypoint for example, Increase storage space (v2) by lucasdemarchi · Pull Request #4172 · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub. Still waiting to be merged, see #2.
4

Honestly? I would try to recompile APM Rover from source under Ubuntu. It has apt packages for ROS and it worked for me OK. Maybie also run APM .deb package. Telemerty can be piped by tcp/udp loopback or named pipe.

For UAV ROS may be too slow for low-level operations, but for rover I think you don’t even need RT kernel.

I would start from trying APM on Ubuntu, I had bad experience trying to compile ROS from source on Debien Wheezy, maybie Jessie works better.

5

I currently use APM but am needing more, hence the need to look at alternative systems. I’m just finding APM to be getting in the way a lot and looking at custom solution. Combination of ROS and APM seem like the worst of each IMO.